Bringing Back the Packs
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
Timber wolves from Canada are unlikely to recolonize the northeastern United States on their own, leaving the politically more contentious course of deliberate reintroduction as the best strategy for restoring the wild wolf's howl to the region, a new study sponsored by New York's Wildlife Conservation Society has found.
While there are corridors of natural habitat through which wolves from southern Quebec might move into Maine, the study found, many barriers inhibit their passage, most importantly legal hunting and trapping, which have long been a way of life in that region of Canada.
"It's a pretty intense gantlet they would have to run" to survive in numbers sufficient to establish a permanent population in the United States, said Dr. William Weber of the Wildlife Conservation Society, formerly the New York Zoological Society.
Dr. Weber was one of four authors of the study, which appears in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin, a scientific journal.
Even if a few lone wolves were to succeed in filtering into the northeastern states, the study found, they might well mate with the region's abundant coyotes. This could create a hybrid population in which the wolf gene pool would eventually be swamped, defeating the very purpose of recolonization.
Artificially reintroducing wolf packs might overcome that difficulty, some scientists believe, because packs tend to kill coyotes rather than breed with them.
Conservation organizations, led by the Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife, have been pressing for the re-establishment of timber wolves in northern New England or the Adirondacks or both, where they were once plentiful but have been extinct for about a century.
The new study "says what we have felt all along, that natural colonization probably isn't highly likely," said Nina Fascione, the director of species conservation for the Defenders of Wildlife.
Although wolves are plentiful in Canada and Alaska, several species of them have long been legally protected as endangered or threatened in the contiguous 48 states, where populations numbering in the thousands were hunted to the verge of extinction, or beyond, well into the 20th century.
Today, gray wolves are on the rebound in two former American strongholds, the Northern Rockies and the upper Great Lakes.
More than 30 packs totaling 400 to 500 wolves now inhabit large areas of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, mostly because wolves artificially introduced from western Canada in 1995 and 1996 have rapidly reproduced. Some 2,500 wolves now live in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, where they have always lived.
Wolves Are Establishing Strong Roots in RockiesExperimental restoration of the gray wolf to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming has been so successful since 1995, Federal officials say, that the first steps toward a single, integrated wolf population in the Northern Rockies have now been taken.
In the Yellowstone area, where wolves have been most visible to wildlife enthusiasts, there are now about 110 adult wolves and roughly 60 newborn pups organized into 11 or 12 packs, said Edward E. Bangs, a biologist with the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service who heads the Northern Rockies recovery program.
The wilderness of central Idaho is home to at least 12 packs with about 115 adults and 60 to 65 pups.
Canadian wolves were introduced to these two areas in 1995 and 1996, and natural reproduction has steadily expanded their populations since then.
In addition, 8 packs with about 60 adults and some 50 pups now inhabit northwestern Montana as a result of natural southward expansion of wolves from Canada that began in the mid-1980's.
About 10 percent of the wolves die each year from various causes, including starvation, predation by mountain lions, auto collisions, avalanches, old age and gunshots.
Most of the latter killings were done legally, after wolves preyed on livestock.
Just as significant as their numbers is the fact that in at least two instances, wolves from different populations have mated, making a genetic connection that could be the foundation for a single Rockies population.
And for the first time since the reintroductions, wolves have taken up territories well outside Yellowstone Park in the last year.
One pack each has established itself near Cody, Dubois and Jackson, all in Wyoming, some 50 miles from the park boundary.
The Jackson pack has adopted the National Elk Refuge as its winter hunting ground.
One could sit in Jackson this winter, "sipping your latte and watching nature at work" as the wolves hunted down elk, Bangs said.
In another ecological milestone, he said, one Yellowstone pack has learned to attack and kill bison in the park and is now something of a bison specialist. The Yellowstone wolves generally have concentrated on the park's abundant elk population.
From 1995 through 1998, 80 cattle, 190 sheep and 12 dogs were confirmed victims of the Northern Rockies wolves.
Nearly $70,000 in compensation was paid to the affected owners from a fund maintained by the Defenders of Wildlife, according to a report by Bangs and others in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin.
Forty-seven wolves were moved after depredations, and 43 marauding wolves have been killed.
By comparison, according to the report, livestock producers in Montana alone lose an average of 142,000 sheep and 86,000 cattle, valued at $45 million year, to all causes each year.
A Federal court has decided that the rules under which reintroduced wolves can be killed violate the Endangered Species Act and has ordered all the wolves removed from Central Idaho and Yellowstone.
The case is now on appeal.
As a practical matter, Bangs said, the wolves are now so numerous and well-established that removing them would be a problem. "You could remove all the wolves," he said, "but you couldn't catch them all alive."
Many of the wolves born after the initial reintroductions are not wearing radio collars and would be hard to find. "To recapture all of them would be very difficult," Bangs said.
If the restoration program survives the court challenge, the Northern Rockies wolf population can be removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act when there have been at least 100 wolves and 10 packs in each of the three recovery areas.
"We are dad-gum close to the countdown"
to that day, said Bangs.
WILLIAM K. STEVENS
The Midwestern and Western wolves are doing so well, in fact, that Federal officials plan to remove the Great Lakes population from the protected list soon and hope they will be able to follow with the newly re-established Northern Rockies population in two or three years.
The Mexican wolf is also being restored to the Southwest, albeit with much difficulty, and the red wolf has been re-established in the Southeast.
As a result of these efforts, according to the new study and others, the wolf population of the United States outside Alaska has doubled and the wolf's range has nearly tripled.
Now Federal officials are turning their attention to the Northeast.
After the plan to reclassify some wolves under the Endangered Species Act is published in the Federal Register for public comment, perhaps next month, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service will begin putting together a recovery plan for wolves in the Northeast, said Paul Nickerson, a wildlife biologist who heads the agency's regional office of endangered species in Hadley, Mass. All recovery options will be considered, he said.
From the standpoint of conserving biological diversity, the basic rationale for re-establishing wolves in the Northeast could be strengthened by recent genetic studies by Canadian scientists.
Their findings, not yet published, suggest that the timber wolf of eastern Canada and formerly of the eastern United States, long considered a subspecies of gray wolf, is in fact a separate species and may be more closely related to the red wolf than the gray.
Proponents of wolf recovery say that restoring wolves would help to re-establish natural ecological relationships long sundered in the Northeast.
For instance, wolves prey on moose, which are too big for coyotes. Moose have flourished in northern New England, both because there are no predators and because logging has created ideal second-growth habitat for them.
Wolves, which along with cougars were historically the region's top predators, might restore some natural equilibrium with moose, say the advocates, just as they might help control runaway deer and beaver populations. In addition, the carcasses of animals killed by wolves provide food for scavengers that are essential elements of a complete ecosystem.
Moreover, wolves have acquired a certain cachet, as their new popularity in Yellowstone testifies, and proponents say they bring in tourist dollars. But opponents argue, as they did in the West, that wolves would prey on livestock.
There have been some attacks in the West, and owners of the livestock have been compensated from a special fund set up by the Defenders of Wildlife.
In Idaho and around Yellowstone, owners are allowed under Federal rules to shoot wolves they see attacking livestock, and some have been legally killed. Some opponents also fear that wolves might attack people, but experts on wolves say that they strongly fear humans and avoid them.
Ms. Fascione said that for her, the possibility of interbreeding between wolves and coyotes was the biggest concern about the success of wolf restoration in the Northeast.
Her organization, which has been instrumental in the Northern Rockies wolf restoration, is completing its own two-part study of restoration in the Northeast.
An earlier study sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society, in 1997, concluded that the Adirondacks were too removed from Canadian wolf packs for any natural recolonization to take place.
It also found that the Adirondacks had little more than half the area needed to sustain a wolf population.
If wolves were put into the Adirondacks, Dr. Weber said in a recent interview, they would probably expand into more of upstate New York and neighboring New England.
The 1997 study found that northern New England was a better bet than the Adirondacks for both natural colonization and for providing sufficiently extensive habitat.
It also identified two possible corridors near Quebec City along which wolves could disperse from Quebec into Maine.
The authors of that study said, however, that further investigation would be required to determine whether wolves were actually likely to move along the corridors.
The new study found that highways, railroads and the St. Lawrence River posed formidable barriers across these corridors.
It also concluded that intensive hunting and snaring, coupled with negative attitudes toward wolves, would further inhibit their spread.
Moreover, the study found, hunting and trapping had reduced the wolf population of southern Quebec enough to lessen the pressure on wolves to migrate to the United States.
The authors said that natural colonization remained a possibility if Canada and the United States worked together to to protect wolves in the dispersal corridors.
It also noted that any reintroduction of wolves to the northeastern United States would require Canadian cooperation, because the wolves would probably spread into New Brunswick. "Any restoration in New England has to be done with binational cooperation," Ms. Fascione said.
